Crucial v4 (256GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 22, 2012 1:01 PM ESTFinal Words
Building a low-cost SSD is not easy; we have witnessed that many times now. There are essentially two ways to build one: either you go with a cheap controller or cheap NAND. What Crucial chose was a cheap controller and higher quality NAND. Since Crucial is a subsidiary of Micron, that choice makes sense because their expertise lies in the NAND fabrication, not in the controller technology. NAND actually still has fairly big profits despite the decline in prices, so Crucial/Micron can use good quality NAND in low-end SSDs and still turn a profit. A powerful third party controller would basically make the v4 an m4 and defeat the purpose of a budget SSD.
A good example of the other approach, a powerful controller and cheap NAND, is OCZ's Agility 4. It uses the same Indilinx Everest 2 controller as found in Vertex 4 but is coupled with asynchronous NAND instead of faster but more expensive synchronous NAND. OCZ is a controller company, so that concept was the most sensible for them. You will have to buy NAND from someone anyway and an easy way to cut the expenses is to simply buy cheaper, lower quality NAND.
Both of these ways have something in common: neither of them really works. The Agility 4 isn't really worth the small savings as we found in our review, and neither is Crucial's v4. To be straight, the v4 is slow. I'm okay with it being SATA 3Gbps but in that case, it should at least be one of the faster SATA 3Gbps drives. Intel SSD 320 and first generation SandForce drives are beating it by a factor of three to five in both Storage Suites, which is unacceptable for a new SSD in 2012.
The v4 would have to be significantly cheaper than any other SSD to be worth buying. At the current prices, you can get an SSD that is several times faster for $5-20 more depending on the model and capacity. If you're lucky, you may be able to catch a hot sale and get a good SSD (say Samsung SSD 830 for instance) for less than the v4. Hence I really can't recommend the v4 at all; you're better off waiting a short while for a sale on a better SSD, or just pay slightly more now if you're in a position where waiting is not possible (a drive failure for example).
The only value SSD that really makes sense is Samsung's SSD 840. You really need a good controller and firmware to build a good SSD; if you just use the cheapest possible controller on the market you will end up with a bad SSD. Fast NAND doesn't help if the controller is the bottleneck because it simply cannot feed the NAND with data fast enough, but it's possible to get away with slower NAND if you have a great controller as we saw with the SSD 840. Even the 840 faces stiff competition from existing drives (e.g. Samsung's own 830), though, so until prices drop for TLC drives we suggest looking at the existing SSDs.
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mattdobs - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Sounds like Crucial needs to buy OCZ's Indilinx controller to make a wining drive.extide - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Uhhhh.... I don't think you get the point of this drive.... And they should definitely not buy an OCZ controller.Beenthere - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Almost no one could ever actually tell the performance difference between any SATA 2 vs. any SATA 3 SSD in actual use, unless you run the benches - which may be inaccurate as we see with compressible data and SandForce controllers. I suspect SSD makers have also learned how to inflate the numbers just as GPU makes have.That being said there is a price point at which people will buy anything they perceive is of value. ~$100 for an ~128 GB. SSD is enough for many people to buy. Quite frankly only a small percentage of consumers acuti\ully need a large capacity SSD/HDD. Most folks can get buy with 60-128 GB. capacity but naive consumers have been programmed to believe they need a 500 GB. drive. Few people do but when you can buy a 500 GB. HDD for $100 many people take the bait.
yyrkoon - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
"Few people do but when you can buy a 500 GB. HDD for $100 many people take the bait."How do you know what people need ? You don't.
At any rate. I'd say many people who feel they need a SSD for $100 are swallowing the bait. hook, line and sinker. Until prices drop significantly. There are many reasons why to opt for more storage versus performance. Very few productive applications take advantage of that much disk performance. Unless you will propose that running multiple SSD's in one large RAID array to play the latest greatest game is something most consumers do . . . Or sit and stare at how fast windows boots.
See, most people have a life that does not revolve around computers. Novel idea I know. Then when they do use a computer, they generally do not care if it takes a few extra seconds to load something from disk. But they *do* care if the disk they use wont hold their family pictures, videos, or audio collection.
Also, you can buy a good 1TB 2.5" HDD for less than $100 now days . . .
Chaser - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Anandtech consistently recommends not filling a SSD to capacity and leaving a portion of it unused for performance purposes. So for me I go with a 240GB SSD so that I don't have to "swap out" games. Yes I want higher performance in gaming with zone/instance loading etc.I ALSO use a 500GB magnetic drive as my media drive for docs, pics, music, data in general.
So this is what I NEED and enjoy using.
Zanegray - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
"Very few productive applications take advantage of that much disk performance. Unless you will propose that running multiple SSD's in one large RAID array to play the latest greatest game is something most consumers do . . . Or sit and stare at how fast windows boots."Honest question, have you used an ssd before? Because your post sounds like you've never touched one. Boot times are not the reason I run an ssd. I run an ssd because nearly every application benefits - from app start up to saving a file to browsing the file system to caches (you must use an Internet browser). SSD's are the new client side storage paradigm and until you realize that you are stuck in the past.
Beenthere - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
SSDs are an "immature technology" as Anand has stated. While they can offer improved performance over a HDD, they still have teething issues in many cases. Until all of the Bugs are resolved, a lot of people will wait to upgrade as the hassles aren't worth the modest performance gain, based on my testing.extide - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Sadly, you are doing it wrong if you are only getting a moderate performance increase. Terribly wrong :/hp79 - Sunday, November 25, 2012 - link
I only have one comment for you. You must be stuck in 2007.erple2 - Sunday, November 25, 2012 - link
I think that you're right. The average consumer doesn't want the hassle of trying to remember where they put thing on which drive, plus have to manage the hassle of 2 drives. So until these are cheap at about 500 gigs (~$200), were stuck with the false promise of 120 gig ssd's.I have a laptop with a 160gig ssd plus a 250gig spindle drive, and I gave up on the general hassle of remembering what goes where and where I put things. I had to go to the internet to figure out "esoteric" windows CLI utilities to move my user profile to the magnetic drive (how freaking hard, Redmond, is it to mimic 'ln -s source destination'?????? Why are files treated any different than directories?????). And I'd consider myself a much more patient (and advanced) user than ordinary consumers. I now just do the uninstall/reinstall swap instead.
I suppose that I mostly blame steam, but that's not fair for the finger pointing share.